Favorite Movies Seen in 2015

Here are my five-star films of 2015, in the order I saw them (IMDB's year of release in parentheses).

Boyhood (2014)

It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005)

Barbara (2012)

The Loving Story (2011)

Photographic Memory (2011)

Nightcrawler (2014)

Whiplash (2014)

The Well-Digger's Daughter (2011)

The Boxtrolls (2014)

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)

The Fitzgerald Family Christmas (2012)

The Professional (1994)

Inside Out (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

Two Days, One Night (2014)

The End of the Tour (2015)

Gloria (2013)

The Rabbi's Cat (2011)

The Martian (2015)

Experimenter (2015)

Ranking the 2016 Academy Award Best Picture Nominees

And now a more recent set of movies.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road

A spectacle of world-building.

2. The Martian

Sci-fi adventure, served light and droll.

3. Room

A really gripping tale that somehow makes a virtue of a severely limited environment. These top three films were just noses apart in my ranking of favorites.

4. Spotlight

Not quite All the President's Men, but we're always ready for another story of the virtuous press scoring a victory against a rotten institution.

5. Bridge of Spies

A very comfortable old sweater: A virtuous man continues to make right choices and does good.

6. Brooklyn

A modest little immigration romance, easy to underestimate.

7. The Big Short

Mostly entertaining, but it lost points for being self-consciously cute; and in the end it's hard to root for any of these hardcore capitalists.

8. The Revenant

Like the top film, a spectacle. Unlike the top film, kind of ridiculous. Still worth a look, though.

Ranking the 2015 Academy Award Best Picture Nominees

Remember these films? I do, vaguely. I ranked these a while ago but am only now getting around to adding a few notes. Starting at the top:

1.Whiplash

Brilliant psychological drama, great performances, boffo ending.

2. Boyhood

A monumental anti-epic, a gamble of a project that paid off handsomely.

3. Birdman

Showy, sharp take on performance. Loved the ending. Maybe a bit too much drumming.

4. The Grand Budapest Hotel

This time, the quirkiness is charming.

5. The Imitation Game

Cumberbatch is immensely watchable, and the interwoven tracks showing three different periods in Turing's life are a satisfying way of telling his story.

6. American Sniper

Good lead performance by Cooper, and the war zone sequences are tense; but the film has the feel of a whitewash.

7. Selma

The film suffered from trying to cover two subjects: Selma and MLK. The former was much more engrossing; ditching the Nobel Prize, LBJ, and even George Wallace would have made this a much better movie.

8. The Theory of Everything

This seemed like an even bigger whitewash than the sniper film, and much less interesting.